Many times, I read in various blogs and forum posts that a solid SEO strategy (with good rankings) is good enough to attract visitors to a website. I completely disagree with this view. While SEO is an important component of any integrated marketing campaign, paid search must not be overlooked when implementing an online strategy. According to Clickz, the paid search market generated approximately $10 billion in revenue in 2005 and is expected to grow 41 percent in 2006. How can any organization, marketer or blogger ignore these astronomical figures? Additionally, according to a study by WebSideStory that monitored twenty B2C e-commerce websites, paid search had a median order conversion rate of 3.4 percent, while organic search results produced a conversion rate of 3.13 percent. The data set included more than 57 million search engine visits.
Technorati Tags: paid search, search engine marketing, seo, search engine optimization, organic search